BTS ARMY BUS CAMPAIGN

The South Korean boy band known as BTS has taken the world by storm with their unique brand of Korean pop (Kpop) music. With their rise to international superstardom, it wasn’t long before South Africa discovered and fell completely in love with BTS.

​

Two fans residing in Cape Town wanted to come up with a concept to promote BTS to a local audience and create visibility and curiosity within the local and global community of fans who were celebrating FESTA - the month the band debuted in 2013. The aim of the concept was to allow the local fanbase (known as the BTS ARMY) to engage with a fun, exciting project. They reached out to Tractor Outdoor to have a look at the various OOH opportunities that could assist them. The campaign was funded privately which meant that they needed a medium that was cost effective and one that would bring the message across quickly but effectively.

The idea was to brand one bus in a full wrap to make it look like a BTS tour bus replica where they ran a competition call to action as the artwork, telling fans that if they spot the bus to take an image and share it via social media to stand a chance to go into a lucky draw to win a BTS Album.

​

The branded bus made its way onto Cape Town main roads on 10 June 2019, but teaser campaigns went live via Twitter just days before the launch created quite a stir amongst fans waiting in anticipation. With such an overwhelming response from fans, the campaign was extended for another month and ran into the early weeks of August.

​

The bus was well spotted on Jakes Gerwel, Klifontein Road, N2 Highway, R300 and Govern Mbeki Road as well as various main roads close to the following areas Athlone, Cape Town CBD, Claremont, Cape Gate and Killarney.

This allowed the campaign to further leverage off social media by allowing fans to engage with their Twitter account to upload their images of the bus thus increasing their following and online engagements:

​

During campaign period (21May – 31 June) the account received over 1.3M impressions

In June, it peaked at 706K impressions, showing the most engagement during this month

They crossed the 3000 follower mark in June (they generally collect about 200+ followers per month)

They received 216 entries for the competition.

Mentions:

​

The Weekend Argus approached them to write an article about the bus campaign.

The tweets about the bus also travelled around the world and were seen and promoted by numerous international fanbases and were translated into other languages.

It was also mentioned on radio - Heart, Goodhope, KFM - but by Lunga Singama on Heartfm in particular.

The content producer for a popular South African morning show also reached out and expressed interest in featuring the project.